Unearthing Injustice: The Toxic Legacy of Uranium Mining
By Bryan Stacy
“Gone are the beautiful valleys, which at the time provided farming spaces to the villagers as a means of subsistence. Fruit trees and cornfields are but a memory to my generation. The majestic plateaus, the sandstone rock formations of unending blends of off-white, beiges, tans, and reds are now mingled with the grays and black of the disrupted Earth. It’s a shame that my five grandchildren will never walk in those same places. Mesas and Unique rock formations are found, as settings, in stories and myths as told for many generations in Paguate. Some of those formations were blasted into eternity. How can a person who has grown up with these stories begin to understand the destruction, not only to the land, but to the stories that have sustained us over the centuries?”
- Mildred Chino, Resident of Paguate Village
Located about 20 miles outside of Albuquerque, NM, the Laguna Pueblo finds itself the victim of the nuclear beast. For about 30 years, the Pueblo hosted one of the world’s largest open-pit uranium mines, contributing to about half of the uranium supply used by the United States for nuclear weapons from the Grants Mineral Belt. The result is generations of health defects and the destruction of a land that many indigenous people called home.
Many researchers praise nuclear power plants as the solution to a fossil-free future, as they do not produce greenhouse gas emissions during operation, they can be deployed at a large scale within a beneficial timeframe, and can be cost-competitive with traditional energy sources. Opponents point to the potential safety hazards and waste storage challenges as reasons to avoid the large-scale development of nuclear power plants. Often left out of these discussions, however, is a core component of nuclear energy production: the source itself.
Uranium is the chemical element, which, once refined, is necessary to power nuclear reactors that produce electricity. It is mined through either open-pit or underground mining, typically in the Western United States, Australia, Canada, Central Asia, Africa, and South America. Uranium mining is known to result in health defects to miners such as lung cancer, kidney disease, bone cancer, and affect reproductive function. The mining process can contaminate air, water, and soil with toxic metals, which can then move through the environment.
Since A.D. 1300, members of the Laguna Pueblo have been occupying the land around the Jackpile-Paguate Mine, about 30 miles west of Albuquerque. The area became one of the largest open-pit uranium mines in the world around 1950, and many members of Laguna Pueblo became employed by the mines. In 1975 Report by the EPA, it was determined that continued consumption of water from the Jackpile Sandstone aquifer was unsafe for human health due to elevated levels of dissolved uranium in the groundwater, and it eventually became a superfund site. In a 2017 report, The CDC Agency for Toxic Substances and disease registry concluded, “we do not know whether past exposures might have harmed health” in reference to radon levels in the air, skin-to-skin contact with contaminated surface water, consumption of fish, animals or plants collected near or downstream from the site, or spending time in the housing areas near the mine. They base their conclusions on the lack of data available to determine contaminate levels, leaving a single simple recommendation to residents of Laguna Pueblo: stay away from the mine.
In 2019, then-U.S. Representative and citizen of Laguna Pueblo Deb Haaland testified in congress, “At the Jackpile mine, these poisons were dumped in a an open pit without any lining to protect the ground and the groundwater because it was the standard at the time.”[1] Today, clean-up measures at the site, like the installation of groundwater monitoring wells, are still not complete, even though they began over four decades ago. While Laguna citizens want to revive traditional practices of farming on their land, they refuse to do so because their source of irrigation is still contaminated with uranium.
The case study of Laguna Pueblo is not an uncommon one in the southwestern United States. Navajo Nation and the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe in Utah have faced similar challenges to uranium mining. One tool available to movement lawyers and the public at large is the Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool. It defines and locates communities that have been marginalized, underserved, and overburdened by pollution. The idea for this tool is that it can promote President Biden’s Justice40 Initiative by giving federal agencies, “a clear and consistent definition of disadvantaged communities, so that agencies can ensure that the benefits of climate, clean energy, affordable housing, and other environmental investments are reaching these communities.”
In the ongoing discussion about environmental justice in the American southwest, the Laguna Pueblo demonstrates the importance of uplifting the voices of marginalized communities so that they are heard in environmental planning decisions. Rainbow Political Theory and the Tularosa Downwinders provide additional examples of how bringing underserved communities into the forefront of conversations can bring about substantively improved environmental outcomes. Most importantly, the legacy of environmental injustice in the nuclear age will not be forgotten anytime soon.